Welcome to Chez Cliff!

Sir Richard Branson came out with another book.  Too cheap to buy it, I stood in the store and perused it.  In a section regarding Virgin Airlines, I read a note “We needed to boil down Virgin Airlines and get back to our core.”

Boiling down a business.  Finding our core.  The next step.

If you had a small grocery store and the only thing you sold was Twinkies, would you constantly try and push bananas?  You push, advertise, offer samples and no one buys.  Inventory spoils and is replaced again and again.  The bananas aren’t selling.  Twinkies are flying off the shelf.  At what point do you decide that Twinkies is what you should focus on and stop with the bananas?

I think after three months, conclusions are necessary.

Fact:  The eBook isn’t selling.

Fact:  The software is selling.  Quite well.

I could continue, trying to sell the eBook.  Or it can be used as a tool.  Interest in the book is there.  That’s for sure.  But I think in an eBook format, it’s being associated with other REI ebooks and all of those are free.  If there was a hard-copy available, I think it would sell.

With that, the blog was designed to work with the book.  Producing one really good article per week is tough!  Now I know why some of those bigger sites have 20 authors.  But for search engines, the updating of a sight is important.  Lord Google likes to see his minions updating their websites and giving them preferential treatment.

So we’re going to tweak the business model.  Our core focus:  software.